When Chad laughed, the stiffening cut quivered and laughed with him. “I’m afraid he has. He was a little late getting home, and we met on the doorstep. His eyes popped out of his head, almost. He’s probably hanging over the banisters now, all ears.”
“I hope,” said Bunty, “he’s asleep by this time, or there’ll be no getting him up in the morning. What would you like him to be told, if he assumes I’ve got the whole story out of you?” And though she said “if,” it was immediately clear to George that indeed she had. She wore a satisfied look, as if she had not been altogether left out of events.
“I leave it to your husband,” said Chad, grinning at George. “Or haven’t you got a clue, either?”
“I could tell him the truth, I suppose, but he’d be pretty disgusted with you.”
“Oh, I don’t know!” said Chad, smiling down a little somberly at the curling smoke of his cigarette. “He’d see the arguments for nonviolence—in the circumstances. Still, I do admit—”
“You’d have liked to pulverize him, wouldn’t you?”
“It would have been a pleasure,” said Chad, in voice and word still understating.
“Why didn’t you? Oh, I know, you were thinking about Jim, you wanted him safe out of the rotten business without any more harm—and all that. Still—why didn’t you?”
The hard, lean fingers closed gently together on the end of the cigarette and crushed it out. “I was afraid,” said Chad, very simply, “that if I started I should probably kill him.”
Five
« ^ »
Helmut Schauffler was discharged on the bodily harm charge, though with a warning that it was dismissed only by reason of an element of doubt as to his motives, and the extent to which sheer accidental circumstances had framed him. On the assault charge he was fined ?2, which within the allotted time he contrived to pay. The magistrates gave full weight to his passionate plea that everybody was against him, and the worst construction automatically put on everything he did; so anxious were they to be excluded from the everybody thus censured that they leaned over backwards to be generous to him, and expressed the hope that he would yet find his niche in England, and settle down happily among his neighbors. The local colliery administration had already decided by then that they would be courting trouble by taking him back, and in their turn hoped that something else might be found for him, something more retired from the frictions of hostel life. Say some job on a farm. He was able-bodied, and a hard worker by inclination; if he had to deal only with a very small group of individuals who were prepared to take a little trouble with him, the results might still be admirable. The magistrates called this case to the attention of any local farmers who might be in need of a hand, and hoped one of them would feel able to make the experiment.
Gerd Hollins read the local weekly religiously from front page to back every Saturday evening. She put it down and looked at her husband over the carefully folded sheets at last, and was quiet for a long time. Whenever she fixed her eyes on him thus, Chris Hollins felt their plucking as the strings of a harp feel the fingers that wrest music out of them, and had to look up and meet her dark glance before he could have any rest.
They had been married now for ten years; she had been in England for twelve, and her speech was flawlessly English, perfected even with the leisurely country softness of Comerford, where she had learned most of it. But she kept still some little opulent gestures and elaborations of manner which set her apart as clearly as an accent would have done. She had been assimilated without being changed; sometimes it was merely plain that she was not English, sometimes one could safely judge her country to be Germany. Always, though her quietness withdrew it into the background of her personality, the discerning eye could be sure that she was a Jewess. Her father had been a teacher in Dessau; there had been three brothers, and one more sister. Now there was only Gerd. She had escaped in the autumn of 1937, and by interminable ways round Europe arrived in England, where she had found domestic work, and begun to scrape together all the money she could, in readiness for the day when some other member of the family should follow her. But nobody ever came. It was only by the most elaborately capricious of chances that she herself had ever arrived. Long after she had married Christopher Hollins she had gone on hoping and believing that the others would turn up, after the war; and after the war she had traced at least her youngest brother, but to a cardboard box of ashes on a shelf in a room of the crematorium of Osviecim. And that was all.
Gerd was in the middle thirties, and already less handsome than she had been; but Chris was fifty, and found her very beautiful. Even if her figure had rounded and spread far more disastrously, and the understandable gray in her smooth, rather coarse black hair been more obtrusive, he would still have thought her a beauty, for he was still in love with her, and probably always would be. He had lived all his life in the constant round of his little lands, a hill-farm just above the village, mostly sheep-pasture; but she had brought here in her person all the romance and all the tragedy of Europe, and in spirit he understood it better, and burned with it more deeply, than many who had wandered through it in uniform and seen it for themselves, but without an interpreter. Most people found him narrow and dull and virtuously uninteresting, but inside the placid shell she had found house-room for all the havoc of humanity’s hopes; and living alone with him was not boring to her.
She folded the paper more firmly, the dry half-column of “Magistrates’ Courts” framed between her hands. “Chris, have you seen this?” She gave it to him. He read it silently, and looked at her again, and gravely.
“Perhaps you’ll think it a counsel of desperation,” she said, “but I want you to take in this man.”
“But all these years,” he said, astonished, “you’ve avoided having any contact with Germans. Why should you suddenly want to have one here? I’m dead sure it would be a mistake. Better not to think of them, even, not to remember they exist.”
“I know! I’ve been wrong to avoid the issue. If by trying one could really forget they exist, that might be well. But I have tried—as you say, I’ve tried for years—and without success. How long can one go on running away from a fact, I wonder? Chris, I haven’t done you or myself any good. You can’t pretend things haven’t happened. I’m tired of trying. If I could make this effort, it would be better for us both.”
“It’s too big a risk,” he said. “We should be fools to go looking for trouble. He’ll only remind you all over again, every time you look at him. That’s no way to get rid of memories.”
“I’ve tried smothering them,” she said, “for years. It’s no good that way, Chris. I can’t forget things that way. There’s only one thing for it, and that’s to admit everything and accept everything, and find some way of living that doesn’t mean always sitting on top of a chest of grudges, trying to keep the lid from opening. If I could get used to the idea that Germans are much the same as other flesh and blood—if there could be some ordinary boy, stupid perhaps, difficult perhaps, I don’t care—only someone who could have something in him worth forgiving—”
“You seem to have picked a difficult case if you want this one,” he said bitterly.
“There are no easy ones. Anyhow, what would be the good of an easy one? It would mean nothing. But he’s young— and if it succeeded, I should be a lot happier. Chris, I want to try. Let me try!”
